TALA

Founded just three years ago, TALA has undergone extraordinary growth to become an industry-leading provider of activewear.

TALA needed a fulfillment partner who could cope with their pace of scale, manage huge variation in order volumes and help them to expand globally.

The brand was founded by social media influencer and entrepreneur, Grace Beverley, who has over 1m followers on Instagram, which has resulted in some huge product launches. Stephen Sunley, Customer Service and Operations Manager at TALA, said:

“One of the challenges we face is due to our huge social media following, when we launch a new product, we see a large increase in order volume and demand for that product. So we can easily go from doing 100 orders on the Monday to 3,000 or 4,000 on the Tuesday. To find a fulfillment partner that can flex at that kind of speed is quite difficult and not something we can do in-house without relying on lots of temps and agency staff which would be a big logistical challenge in-house.”

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Fluctuations in demand caused by seasonality or launches are very common for eCommerce businesses and particularly in the fashion industry. J&J Global Fulfilment have offered TALA the option to scale up and scale down their order volumes around product launches and seasonality but has also allowed the team to focus on what they do best; building the brand and the huge following that TALA has.

“There is no way as a stand-alone business we could achieve this, we might be able to emply half a dozen people in a warehouse but when we do a launch that could take a week for them to get through all the orders. The benefit of somewhere that is outsourced is that you can employ a much bigger team who can bring agency staff in to a level where they are still supervised and managed by experienced staff.”

J&J have trained fulfillment experts in-house to deal with fluctuations in order volumes. The flexibility for space and trained staff offers a solution to remain profitable for brands who experience seasonality trends or influencer product launches.

“It’s the flexible wall syndrome as well, we will bring a lot of stock in for that launch that may go really quickly, if we owned that warehouse, we would be paying for all that empty storage in between the launches that we’re not using. With somewhere like J&J, we pay for the space we use so it’s making a huge saving on storage costs.”

“During our recent TALA outerwear launch (which is a brand new market for us so had a lot of pressure), we were faced with delayed deliveries in to the fulfillment center with the stock only landing the day before it was scheduled for despatch then we had system issues on the day forcing us to stop picking for a long period of time. Despite this, the J&J team managed to still hit the forecasted despatch quantity on the day and then set a new TALA record of nearly 2,500 orders shipped the following day and we were back within SLA by the weekend. Incredible work I’m sure by the whole team but want to specifically thank the teams in Goods in and those picking and packing for this amazing turnaround and delighting our customers in record time”

Using a fulfillment partner has allowed TALA to scale up and sell internationally. Partnering with J&J is much more than picking and packing, the strategic plans, in-house experts and technology help free up more time for brands to focus on scaling up.